An extremely common question, especially for those heading to Europe for the first time, is what kind of plug adapter to use for their cameras, laptops, phones, iPads etc. In this video, I take a look at three common adapter types and show you how they work. I also show you what to look for to make sure your particular device will work on European voltages, and what kind of devices won't work.
This really is one of those topics where literally taking a look at the converters is so much better than reading about them. Enjoy!

Bottles of Chianti and Brunello wine at a Montalcino Enoteca (wine bar)
A trip to Tuscany inevitably means a glass of red Chianti Classico for most visitors. But what makes this wine special?
Chianti Classico must come from grapes grown in a strictly defined area of the hills between Florence and Siena, centered around Castellina, Gaiole, Radda and Greve:
Chianti wine regions
The original boundaries were laid down in 1716 by Cosimo III di Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and covered the Tuscan villages of Castellina, Gaiole and Radda. In 1932, Chianti was vastly expanded to cover seven different regions of which the original area was just one. Today, the area is roughly 100 square miles.
There are also rules on the grape content that have changed over the years. Since the 1990s, Chianti Classico has to contain at least 75% Sangiovese grapes, a maximum of 10% Canaiolo, at most 6% white wine grapes and up to 15% Cabernet, Merlot or Syrah.

The official Chianti definition

The definition is controlled by the DOCG, the Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita. In the past 40 years or so, Chianti's reputation has gone from "low-grade red" to a region producing some world-class wines. In the 1970s-90s, it was common to see low-grade Chianti in its traditional straw bottle jacket or fiasco.
In 1971, the Antinori family broke with tradition in releasing a "Chianti-style" blend of Sangiovese and Cabernet called Tignanello. It didn't fit the DOCG definition, which disallowed Cabernet and required at least 10% white wine grapes, so it wasn't officially Chianti Classico. But Tignanello began to win awards and acclaim, prices rose and other producers followed. Thus the "Super Tuscan" wines were born. The success of Super Tuscans led the DOCG to change the rules of grape composition in the 1990s, allowing many Super Tuscans to be reclassified as Chianti Classico.
Chianti Classico is what the French would call an appellation: an area where the grapes are grown within a strict geographical boundary. Contrast this with a Napa wine, for example, which is more of a brand. Napa wines might be made within the boundaries of Napa County, but the grapes or grape juice could have been trucked in from the central Californian coast (as they are for Charles Shaw, AKA "2 Buck Chuck").
Today, thanks to vastly improved wine-making techniques and the relaxation of the official DOCG rules to allow better blending, the Chianti region produces some excellent high quality wines. And none of them are served in a straw fiasco 🙂

In October 2013, T-Mobile introduced a revolutionary new international cell phone capability -- free data and text message roaming in 115 countries, and 20c/min for roaming voice calls. Could this be the best option for travelers looking to save money when in Europe and elsewhere?
Roaming in the shadows of Notre Dame for free?
International Roaming charges are insanely profitable for Verizon and AT&T. How do we know this? Easy: you can go to France or the UK and buy a pre-paid SIM card to get voice calls that cost between 8-15 cents per minute. You're paying the highest price for those calls because you're making no commitment whatsoever. Yet the same voice call, when purchased as international roaming from Verizon or AT&T, would cost you approx 99 cents. AT&T and Verizon have millions of customers who roam Europe making hundreds of millions of calls, so they surely pay a lot less than 8-15 cents. Let's say that call costs them 3 cents/minute, which means AT&T and Verizon make over 95% profit. The costs to interconnect mobile networks are fixed and effectively zero compared to the revenue collected. Everyone in the mobile phone industry knows this, but only T-Mobile has decided to do something about it.

[Updated May 2013 with new AT&T screen shots and prices]
Travelling with your AT&T iPhone to Europe? Here's how you can make sure it works when you get there and avoid a giant bill when you get back. Who doesn't like to save money?
If you haven't done so already, register with AT&T's web site so that you can make changes to your phone plan options online. Log in with your wireless number and password, so that you get to the home screen for your wireless service. Look in the top-left quadrant of the page for a menu called "I want to...", which will look like this:
Click on "I want to..." to get this menu

We recently got back from a photo trip to Tuscany, where we got to see the July Siena Palio. The Palio is the world's longest continuously running sporting event and runs twice a year during the summer in Siena, Tuscany. Each district (contrade) of the city has a chance to get a horse into the race, and the horses are assigned by lottery.
This short (1 min 30 sec) video gives you a glimpse of the intense emotions of the Sienese around their favorite cultural festival. The video shows the drawing of the horses, where each one is randomly assigned to a contrade, who them parade the horse through the town on the way to their secret stable location (to make sure their rivals can't tamper with the horse!) Jockeys are also randomly assigned to ride each horse.
Through the many hundreds of years that the Palio has been running, there have been all kinds of dark deeds including bribery, violence and drugging, to try and get an unfair advantage to win the race and the prestige that goes along with it. So the transparency of the lottery system is very important to the running of a fair race, which is the main focus of the horse selection you can see in the video. It's quite an event in itself -- there are about 20 thousand people crammed into the main square (Il Campo) to see the drawing and it goes silent when each Palio horse is matched to a contrade.
Once the horse is safely inside the contrade's stable, it is guarded day and night and only brought out for the trial races that take place ahead of the main event. The horse is also blessed by a priest on race day, and it's considered good luck if the horse leaves a pile of manure inside the chapel!

Making a phone call home from Italy, France, the UK or indeed anywhere else in Europe is easy since all countries in the European Union agreed on one standard way of making international calls. You dial two zeros (00), the country code, and then the number. The country code for the US is 1, so a call to the San Francisco number 415-555-1212 is dialed 00-1-415-555-1212.
Beautifully arranged mounds of fresh Italian ice cream await at a Gelateria in Siena, Italy.
Dialing works the same way on mobile phones, or you can use the shorthand of "+" instead of the two zeros. The benefit of this approach is that this works anywhere on any mobile phone network world-wide, not just in Europe -- which is handy for numbers you put into the phone's memory or contact list. In my example, you'd dial +1-415-555-1212, and this same number would work when dialed in the US as well as in Europe.
On regular land-line phones, you can speed up the connection by dialing a # at the end of the number (more precisely, this cuts short the "post dial delay"). This tells the phone network that you are done dialing your international number, and it starts connecting the call immediately. Otherwise, the phone network will sit and wait in case you want to dial any more digits -- several seconds -- because unlike domestic calls, the network doesn't know the exact length of phone numbers for every area of every country. This isn't required with mobile phones because you hit the "send" or "call" button at the end of the number.
One more thing about the '# at the end trick': it works in the US too when dialing internationally. Try it and see!
Want to learn more about calling from Europe? See Using cell phones in Europe part 1, and using mobile data services (part 2)

Traveling with photo gear is much harder than it used to be. Airport security is becoming more and more restrictive. US airport security now has a ban on carrying rechargeable batteries without a container: they must be in a case and not loose in your bag. Multiply this with airport security staff of little understanding and the full authority of Homeland Security, and life can be difficult. So what can you do to minimize traveling friction and get yourself and your gear to your destination safely?
Paris Notre Dame: Flying buttresses, not flying problems.

You might be forgiven for wondering what is going on in this photograph. It is a vertical view down onto the heads of a bunch of grown men in medieval yellow silk outfits waving large flags in Siena, Italy. You can only tell they're men and flags by the shadows, which is part of the appeal in this photograph. But what on earth is going on?
Members of Siena's Eagle contrade throw their flags high into the air during a display in the Campo. Siena, Tuscany, Italy

This photo recently featured as the travel section lead in Links Best Of Golf magazine, and was taken from a ruined monastery on the edge of Volterra, Tuscany. The town itself is at the top of a rocky outcrop west of San Gimignano, and the north-western side has been eroding for hundreds of years. Many buildings are already at the base of the cliffs, and this Pisan-style monastery was abandoned years ago. It was late in the day, and as the sun set from the West it lit up the rolling Tuscan plain, framed by the old stone window.
View west across the Tuscan plain from a ruined monastery at the edge of the cliffs ("balze") in Volterra, Italy.

It has to be one of the most famous places on Earth, never mind the United Kingdom: the prehistoric stone circle that is Stonehenge. But if you have ever been there, you'll have found yourself behind a low fence on a paved path, well away from the stones themselves and far enough away to make good photographs difficult.

It's hard to blame English Heritage, who own the site and are responsible for maintaining Stonehenge. Over the years, visitors have chipped off pieces of stone and carved their initials. Today, you can still see graffiti carved in the 1800s, when the stones were simply sitting in a corner of a lumpy field on the edge of Salisbury plain rather than a protected monument.

How is it that I am so special that I got to go right into the centre of the circle to get the angles and photos you see on the site?

The Bay Bridge over San Francisco Bay, and fireworks bursting in the distance. Who could have planned it better? Well, not me, that's for sure!

I drove to Yerba Buena island to take pictures of the city at night. I had just set up my camera to take photos of the bridge and San Francisco when fireworks started going off over SBC Park (as it was called at the time -- now AT&T Park). I turned my camera to the left, exposed for 5 seconds and carried on taking pictures until the fireworks were over. Perhaps the best photo of the lot is the one shown. The "cause celebre" for the fireworks was the 661st home run of Barry Bonds -- the most ever home runs in Major League baseball.

Ask for a glass of wine in any bar in South-Western France, and the chances are you'll get Vin de Cahors (pronounced "Ca-hoares"), which will be at least 70% Malbec. Ironically, Malbec is now better known in the US thanks to Chilean and Argentinian imports; there are now at least 25,000 acres of the vine planted in Argentina alone. However, Malbec has a long and distinguished history in France -- the "Black Wine of Cahors" was well known 600 years ago in the courts of medieval France.

Ponte Valentre, the medieval bridge over the river Lot in Cahors
A glass of Cahors is dark red or "inky", but also smooth, tannic and blackcurranty. For many years it was used as a blending wine for Bordeaux claret, until a severe frost in 1956 killed 75% of the Malbec vines in that area. Now, in France you find it almost exclusively in Cahors wine and nowhere else.
The grape was first taken to Argentina in the mid-19th century when a regional governor asked Michel Pouget, a French agronomist, to bring cuttings. Interestingly, Argentinian Malbec has smaller grapes (berries) in tighter clusters than that found in France -- clearly a different variety. Maybe the original French Malbec has evolved, or the original variety doesn't exist any more after France's great 19th-century rescue from Philloxera blight by grafting onto American root stock.
Today, the limestone soil of Cahors, found in the flood plain of the river Lot as it winds its way through soft limestone cliffs seems to suit the grape as well today as it has for hundreds of years. Try some next time you fancy ordering outside the usual Bordeaux, Burgundy or Loire favorites.

I uploaded some new photographs of San Gimignano recently, a small town between Florence and Siena (on the road to Volterra) that has become famous for its medieval towers -- "The Manhattan Of Tuscany", as some tours call it.
San Gimignano towers
It's certainly on the tourist map these days, so here's my recommendation for a half day in San Gimignano that allows you both to enjoy the town and what it offers and take some great photographs.

In a previous posting, we'd discovered that American Express Card rental car insurance covered a lot less than in it has in the past. And we weren't sure if we'd be covered for a claim on a "free upgrade" to a Jaguar car in London.
The good news is that Amex paid the claim, as they have in the previous 2 instances where our rental was damaged or vandalized. It takes a while -- mostly waiting on the rental car company to provide their documentation of the charges -- but has worked every time so far.
The take-away is the same: take the time to read the small print before you go to make sure you're covered.

I'm a fan of not paying for rental car CDW (Collision Damage Waiver) insurance, because it's usually unnecessary and expensive when many credit cards already offer coverage. I've written before about positive experiences with American Express' rental car insurance, but a recent trip highlighted the importance of re-reading the small print.
Francesca, one half of LodgePhoto, had rented a car at London Heathrow, and was pleased to get a free upgrade to a Jaguar, which is this rental car company's standard intermediate model. Now, there are Jaguars and Jaguars, and this was one of the former -- i.e. at the low end of the range, nothing exotic, but a pleasant step up from the more typical Ford or Peugot. At the end of the rental, there was a small chip in the windshield, which American Express explained would not be covered "because Jaguars are exotic cars"... which, if true (there's some doubt, see below), means that she'd been driving around without insurance for a few days.
Some digging on the Amex website revealed the small print of Amex's rental car insurance (it is hard to find -- it took two failed searches before following a series of links). There are some fairly substantial limitations in the current rules:

Exotic cars: anything by Porsche, Ferrari, Lamborghini (and other supercar makers). Also listed is the Jaguar XJS, which is not what Francesca rented. Also the Mercedes E320, which I would not consider remotely exotic. Check the document for the full list.

Expensive cars: an MSRP greater than $50,000. This can be a really tough one to figure out when renting overseas -- is that the price of the car when purchased in the US, or the price of the car in purchased in Europe converted to dollars? How would you know either price when presented with a particular car at the rental counter? Is that price at the current dollar exchange rate, or when it was purchased?

Full sized SUVs and Vans: Chevy Suburban, Ford Expedition, Chevy Van etc. If you have a lot of stuff and/or a large family, this might also be a surprise. In Europe I always recommend getting more, smaller cars vs. one huge one, if that is possible, as smaller cars are easier to drive and park on narrow European roads (especially in medieval cities).

This is not the full list of limitations, by the way, just some edited highlights.
So, it's not clear if the windshield chip is covered or not, since Francesca wasn't driving an expensive or exotic car per the small print. We'll find out.
The take-away from all this: re-read the small print. Even if you read it before. It might have changed!